True Luxury Skyscraper Palace Rising in Victory Park, Bringing New Heights and Sky-High Perks: Construction’s Already Quietly Begun on Hines’ Ultra Ambitious Dallas Tower — Your Sneak Peek at The Victor

Everyone wants to call their building a high-rise these days. It’s a great marketing tool — and something catchy for the brochure. But there are high-rises and then there are 39-story towers that truly shoot up toward the clouds in one of the only areas in Dallas that allows such unbridled height and ambition.

Victory Park’s new showcase development is anything but just another high-rise. The Victor, a new project from Hines that quietly started construction on Monday, is right across the street from American Airlines Center and next door to the W Hotel, but where it rises in the sky is what’s liable to leave people talking.

“Taking advantage of an area where we have an opportunity to go unlimited height, which is something you can’t do anywhere else in Dallas unless you’re downtown,” Hines associate Corbin Eckel says of the sky-high vision for The Victor, a 344-unit luxury apartment tower. “Uptown, which is really the market we compete with, they’re capped at 240 feet max height. Unless you get a rezone, which is really hard to do in Uptown Dallas. Very contentious zoning process.

“And here we have the site and the development rights to deliver anything we thought we could make (work).”

So Hines, as is its way — a way set out by founder Gerald D. Hines long ago and still kept to today — decided to go all out. That means bringing in Munoz + Albin, the architecture firm behind Hines’ beyond distinctive Southmore high-rise in the Houston Museum District, to design the building. That means a Sky lounge level on the 36th floor, giving all the residents of the tower access to the very best views in every direction — and their own living room in the sky. (The only thing above the Sky level are three floors of penthouses — 18 individual penthouses to be precise.)

That means a show-stopping sense of arrival with the front drive bisecting through the center of the building on the ground level, giving new definition to pulling up to the front door. And that means almost museum-like unique outside lighting designed to make The Victor jump out in a most tasteful way.

“We’re leveraging all the expertise we have in Houston to take the best features of all the assets we’ve done to date in this high-rise luxury category and infuse them into this project, which frankly is going to be the nicest one we’ve ever done,” Eckel tells PaperCity.

Yes, this tower comes with as high expectations as Simone Biles at the Olympics. The Hines team working on The Victor knows that literally goes with the territory.

“This site is a special site for Dallas,” Hines managing director Ben Brewer says. “Victory is a very special area for Dallas. Not only does it have one of our biggest entertainment venues, American Airlines Center, but it’s also been something in the works for the past 15 odd years.”

With Victory Park’s restaurant rebirth and reimagining well underway — and much more still to come (80 percent of Victory Park’s retail space is leased, but only 50 percent of it is currently occupied), this new high-rise will have a whole new plethora of options outside its doors when it opens in 2021. The projected future WalkScore of the area? 91. That is the type of number more associated with coastal cities such as New York and Boston than anything in Texas.

Imagine LA Live — the ever-growing neighborhood around Los Angeles’ Staples Center — for an idea of Victory Park’s future vision.

The Hines team gave me an exclusive individual sneak peek of their plans for The Victor on the 42nd floor of another high-rise, the one that houses the firm’s Dallas offices on Ross Avenue. Looking out the windows of their glass conference room provides a stark visual reminder of just how much the entire Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is growing.

Brewer and Eckel see it from the sky every day — and their job is to make sure Hines keeps up.

The Victor’s Sky Perks

With rents set to average more than $3 per foot in The Victor, its average 1,294 square-foot units will cost a renter nearly $4,000 per month to live in. These prices almost demand special perks — and this tower is being designed to deliver them. The details are paramount in this high-rise and the Hines team has clearly obsessed over them.

Take the golf simulator on the ninth floor — the tower’s level of amenities (there are more than 30,000 square feet of them on nine). Rather than just some sad imitation of a machine you’d find at Golf Galaxy that’s stuffed into a corner and largely forgotten about, The Victor’s golf simulator will be highlighted by a striking piece of original art — a golfer’s face made out of golf tees — that lords over the space and gives it an original vibe.

There also will be 10-plus curated art pieces in the tower’s common areas. Car fanatics will be able to rent out one (or several) of the 40 private garages that will be within the main garage. (The private garages will close around your prized car with the push of a clicker, much like the garage at a home.)

To The Victor go the well-protected spoils?

Then, there’s the ice. Interior designer MaRS went as far as coming with the idea of a sophisticated-looking ice machine that produces crushed ice.

“Everybody wants Sonic ice,” Brewer says of the fast food chain’s distinctive crushed coolers. “It’s a thing. There are things in life that are things.”

A Millionaire Life

If it’s a thing, Hines wants it in this new showpiece tower. It’s going after a very discerning clientele, including empty nesters who could be giving up sprawling homes for all this vertical luxury and lock and leave lifestyle.

“A lot of empty nesters are looking to leave multi-million dollar homes,” Eckel says. “They can get rid of their house and basically live for what they were paying in taxes.”

The Victor is designed to be the type of tower that produces conversation — and more than its share of sky-high daydreams. “I want people to say that I hope I know somebody who lives in that building,” Brewer says.

The idea behind that thought is someone walks by this distinctive museum-lit-like tower and wishes they had someone to visit there. Then, they consider moving in themselves when they do visit. These Hines guys may have the suits and extra firm handshakes of deal makers, but there is some dreamer in them too.

Not to mention a core appreciation of what truly makes a building special.

“I think ultimately the architecture is going to do a lot of the talking with this project,” Eckel tells PaperCity, looking out the window, all the way to Love Field. “We ultimately told them not to hold anything back with this.”

When you’re reaching for the sky, you cannot be timid or develop scared.

Not on this site. Not in this city. Not now. Not with the future in the air.